This is another in a series of stories I've written for Random Lenghts News about local environmental justice issues that have parallels elsewhere around the country. At this point, there has been a very clear divergence between Long Beach, attempting to avoid confrontation with the trucking industry, and thus increasingly selling out to them, and Los Angeles, which has, after many years of pressure, decided to stand up.
Ports Part Paths On Clean Truck Plans
Long Beach Caves To Trucking Industry,
LA Seeks Change In Federal Law
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
When the ports of Los Angeles (POLA) and Long Beach (POLB) announced their joint Clean Air Action Plan (CAAP) three years ago this month, they pledged to work closely together to clean up the air at both ports, with strong messages of support from the mayors of both cities. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa struck an optimistic note, focusing on economic growth, while Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster struck a tougher tone, saying, "The costs of these [environmental] impacts are already in the system, but the wrong people are paying them,"
But when they finally got around to approving programs to deal trucks-following months of consultations with stakeholder groups-the two port plans diverged sharply, despite rhetoric to the contrary...and it was the LA plan that most aggressively sought to clean up the air, and shift the costs to where they belonged by requiring port truckers to be employees of truck companies that would bear the costs, while POLB did not.
One reason for the difference was the threat of lawsuits from the American Trucking Association (ATA), but ATA sued Long Beach anyway, along with POLA. Now the ports have diverged even more dramatically. On October 19, Long Beach caught everyone by surprise-especially community members and groups involved in crafting the initial plan-by settling the lawsuit out of court. Those involved as stakeholders were outraged by POLB's secret backroom settlement, and lack of accountability to those it loudly pledged to protect. "The Port of Long Beach violated the public trust and sold out the citizens of Long Beach by approving a worthless settlement agreement with the American Trucking Association in their lawsuit against the Los Angeles ports' clean trucks programs," said David Pettit, a senior attorney of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). who had worked with both ports on the lawsuit.
The story in this diary picks up on two aspects of my diary yesterday, "Renormalizing The Wal-Mart World". First, it's snapshot of one of the low-wage spinoffs from the world that Wal-Mart has helped shape. And second, it's directly about one of the three themes discussed within the diary, "Part 3: Dignity-The Ultimate Cost Of Low Prices". Republished from the current edition of Random Lengths News.
The Long Haul: Organizing Port Truckers
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
"I will die tomorrow if today we can form a union. I will be a happy man," said Oscar Ruiz, Teamster organizer for the ports of LA and Long Beach. It's spoken with all the intensity of a man who has lived the life of hardship of those he is struggling to organize.
Ruiz has a life story common to many port truckers. "I'm an immigrant born in Guatemala. I came to this country when I was around 12 years old," he said. "I went to junior high school and high school." It was more education than some port drivers, but not uncommon.
"I learned to drive a truck from my brother. He was a port driver. I became a port driver when I was 18."
That was 1986. Six years after the 1980 Motor Carrier Act changed port trucking forever. The act was supposed to be a progressive piece of legislation, as explained in a recent report from Demos (a progressive public policy research and advocacy organization) titled "Port Trucking Down The Low Road: A Sad Story of Deregulation," by David Bensman of Rutgers University.
"The Motor Carrier Act of 1980 was hailed by liberals and the business community alike as a triumph of policy reform," Bensman wrote. "Senator Kennedy and Ralph Nader led the reformers who charged that trucking regulation meant high rates for consumers, and monopoly profits for businesses. Large shippers lobbied Congress for an end to the rate setting and route planning which limited competition and drove up the cost of freight transport. Civil Rights organizations organizations argued that deregulation would lower barriers that impeded African Americans from gaining a just share of decent trucking jobs." Yet, Bensman wrote, "Despite these high hopes, deregulation has wrecked the drayage industry."
Ruiz came to work in that wreckage, and stayed there 14 years, through four wildcat strikes, working for dozens of different companies, always looking for one that would treat him with dignity and respect. "I never found it," Ruiz said. Blackballed for his activism, he found a union job offport, but always tried to get assignments that let him pass through the port vicinity, and stay in touch with things. Three years ago, he became a port organizer.
Last Tuesday, the Port of Long Beach passed a hastily-concocted plan intended to be the last piece of "clean trucks program" to replace one of the dirtiest diesel truck fleets in the nation.
There's just one problem: It won't work.
Unlike the plan originally presented as far back as last April, this plan would preserve the existing highly exploitive labor system, in which so-called "independent owner-operators" are denied labor rights and receive an average take-home income of just $12 per hour--an income clearly insufficient to enable them to buy and properly maintain the new trucks that are crucial to the plan's success.
By taking this action--with just 3 days notice (three days of a three-day weekend)--the Port of Long Beach broke its partnership with the Port of Los Angeles, which is still expected to pass the original plan, which was modelled on a proposal form the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports, a labor/environmental/public health/faith-based alliance that brought together major elements of the Democratic base (complete member list with links, here). It is a local, Los Angeles-based coalition, but was created with major backing from the Teamsters and Change To Win.
Opposed to it is the $300 billion+ consumer products import industry--from the big box retailers like Wal-Mart, Target, the major shipping and transportation trade associations, and general business alliances like the Chambers of Commerce, on down to roughly a thousand small- to medium-sized trucking companies, most of whom treat their workers like sharecroppers in the segregtion-era South.
Guess which side the Long Beach political establishment took?
This is the same dynamic we see played out over and over again in Washington, but here it is happening much closer to where people live and (as a direct result of this powerful business coalition) die. On the flip is the story I wrote for the paper I work for, Random Lengths News.
